Why .USA Is the National Domain America Actually Needs
I have spent over thirty years building things on the internet. I helped found CIRA, the Canadian Internet Registration Authority, the organization that runs .CA. We built .CLUB from nothing and ran it for nine years before selling it to GoDaddy. I know what it takes to build a domain that means something to people.
And every time I look at .US, I feel a sense of loss.
Not anger. Loss.
Because America deserves so much better.
Every four years, the Olympics come around. Athletes from every nation walk into the opening ceremony wearing their country’s identity on their chest. Not their state. Not their region. Their country.
Canada wears CAN. Germany wears GER. Japan wears JPN.
And the United States walks in wearing USA.
Three letters. Proud. Unmistakable. The whole world knows exactly what it means.
So why, when an American business goes online, do they have to settle for .US?
“US” is a pronoun. It means nothing. It evokes nothing. It is the digital equivalent of walking into the Olympics with a name tag that says “us.”
When I was helping build .CA in Canada, we understood something important. The domain was not just a technical address. It was a statement. It said: this is Canadian. This came from here. You can trust this.
That is what a national domain should do.
Germany understood this. .DE has over 17 million registrations. The Netherlands understood it. .NL has more registrations per capita than almost any country on earth. Canada understood it. .CA has more registrations per capita than the United States by a factor of thirteen.
The most powerful nation on earth has one of the weakest national domains in the world.
That is a policy failure. Not a public failure. The American people never rejected .US. They were never really given a reason to embrace it.
What I believe in is .USA.
Not as a technical experiment. Not as a policy paper. As a national trust mark.
Imagine a domain reserved only for companies and products that are genuinely, verifiably American. Where buying from a .USA website means something. Where a manufacturer in Ohio or a craftsman in Tennessee or a software company in Texas can put .USA after their name and have it mean exactly what it sounds like.
That is what .USA can be.
It is the digital version of “Made in USA” on the label. It is the online equivalent of that Olympic uniform. It is a signal the whole world understands.
I have been asked what happens if we cannot get .USA approved through ICANN. It is a fair question. The process is long and there are no guarantees.
What if we can’t get .USA: then lets reboot .US.
We take what exists, strip away the bureaucracy, and build it into something Americans actually want to use. We market it the way .CA was marketed in Canada. We give businesses a reason to choose it. We make it mean something.
Because the worst outcome is doing nothing.
The United States cannot be the country that leads the world in technology and innovation while also being the country that cannot figure out how to make its own national domain relevant.
I am not a politician. I am not a lobbyist. I am an entrepreneur who has spent his career building things that matter.
And I believe .USA matters.
Not because of the business opportunity. Because of what it represents.
Every country deserves a digital identity it can be proud of. Every nation should be able to say: here is where we are. Here is what we stand for. Here is our mark on the internet.
America has that chance.
It is called .USA.
And it is long overdue.